Frame Time and You - Stabilize Framerate

Preface and Explanation

Frame Time is the amount of time between presenting each frame on screen. For example, if you are running a game at 60FPS, in 1 second of time, 60 frames are appearing on screen, if we convert that to milliseconds, that is 1000ms so each frame is showing up (in a perfect world) at 1 frame per 16. 666 ms.

I said "Perfect World" above because a lot of games do not have stable Frame Times, and Fallout 4 is one of the worse offenders of this issue. With out a equal division of frames appearing on screen, that is where people will experience things informally known as "Micro Stutter" and also feel even though they are getting a solid 60 FPS, they still feel like its dipping. Frame are appearing at different intervals and causing this effect.

Only really until the recent 2-3 years did the greater gaming community as well as reviewers and game developers take this issue seriously. Now various reviewers and benchmarks take this statistic into consideration, some even more so now then Frame Rate.

Frame Time for Fallout 4 is all over the place, but we can change that with the use of some tools. Give this a try and enjoy a smoother game play experience!

How to Stabilize Frame Time

Frame Time can be forcefully stabilized with use of tools for PC that allow you to "Cap Framerates", locking your game from going over a certain frame rate. The tools that do this vary in how they do it, and how effectively they control frame time, some do almost nothing to pace out the frames they are locking to the user, doing nothing to solve the issue, while some do it to a degree but fall short of making at least Fallout 4 stable.

I have tested 3 particular tools with Fallout 4 and have found the best by far and will use it as the tool in this guide. That tool is MSI afterburner and its built in RivaTuner application.

The other methods I have used included ENB Memory patch built in frame capper, as well as Nvidia Inspector. Enb memory patch with at least my hardware failed to lock the frame rate where I specified and did very little for the frame time, and Nvidia inspector (aside from only working with Nvidia Cards) did a middle of the road job at stabilizing frame times.

MSI Afterburner with RivaTuner however, locked the frame rate exactly where I needed it, kept the frame time evenly divided and paced and works with both Nvidia and AMD cards. It also comes with a handy graph monitor so you can visually see the frame rate, frame time and other handy statistics on how you game is running.